Posts Tagged ‘Payday 2’

Imagine if all your favourite murderers in video games got together and did murders together, like a superhero team or a supergroup. The Avengers with no thought for collateral damage, or The Plastic Ono Band with hammers. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number [official site] is more a tribute act of murderers, with schlubs inspired by Jacket’s cool murders in the first game. Hotline Miami’s crossover with Payday 2 is coming closer to that supergroup dream, though, bringing Jacket to the heist FPS.

Oh, and did I mention that Hotline Miami 2 now has a release date? It does: March 10th.

I’m watching The Bomb Heist trailer for Payday 2. Mostly it feels like a cross between a German car advert and an episode of The Killing – it has that same washed out colour palette and deliberate measured dialogue.

It’s a live action thingummy starring Babylon 5’s Mira Furlan which introduces the new DLC. There’s a heist (The Bomb), a new crew member (Dragan) and you meet your new contact, The Butcher.

I’m torn. On one hand, I would very much like to play as a lady in Payday 2. On the other, I don’t want to support the foolishness that is selling the only female character for £4 as DLC. I still feel a bit of a wally for buying Killing Floor‘s lady zombie-shooter. But I do like how the Payday gang’s female member, Clover, is a sweary, excitable Irish lady (hey, this link will make loud noises). Ah, I’ll decide later. This week also brought a new DLC heist, but it doesn’t sound like a great buy.

There aren’t nearly enough Christmas-themed videogames in the world. Where are the modern equivalents to Christmas Lemmings, or the videogame kin to seasonal movies like It’s A Wonderful Life? I’m not satisfied by Christmas updates to non-Christmas games, though I suppose they’re a start.

Payday 2 is doing its bit by running a series of jolly updates to the first-person, multiplayer heist-‘em-up. There’s a new mission to steal some snow-like white powder, and the first few days of updates have thus far also introduced Christmas-themed masks similar to but legally distinct from other beloved Christmas characters.

Look, you can’t name your company Overkill Software then do things meekly. Your games need to shoot thousands of men, steal millions of dollars, and roll out patches in big ostentatious displays. To celebrate co-op heist ‘em up series Payday’s third birthday, over twelve days Overkill have added to Payday 2 everything from new weapons and snazzy sunglasses to a grand new mission and a playable cheap Keanu Reeves lookalike, all for free. They called it Crimefest.

This makes sense. Co-operative bank robbery manshoot Payday 2 is getting a new piece of DLC which is themed around the propulsive, topdown, ultra-violent manbeat Hotline Miami. It’s called Payday 2: Hotline Miami, and there’s a live-action trailer below which contains little detail, followed by some further sentences which contain similarly little detail.

You can be stealthy in Payday 2, sure, but if your sneaky sneaking falls you can always fall back on the old pop-pop and blam-blam your way to riches. Not with the latest mission you can’t, you Loud Larries, Noisy Nellies, and Clodhopping Charlies. No, shhh, you can’t throw that grenade no matter how funny it’d be. No, save all your fighting for when we get to the park. If you don’t stop screaming, we’re turning this heist right around and going home. The new Shadow Raid heist, you see, will be Payday’s first proper stealth mission when it arrives tomorrow in a free update.

The term “DLC” is always most welcome when preceded by the word “free”. It was always the point, really. Rewards for investing in the game in the first place. Remembering this is Overkill, with Payday 2, as it receives an appropriately gruesome Christmassy update today. Set in the bank from Counter-Strike: GO.

David Goldfarb has a brilliant name. He’s the game director of Payday 2, a very good game about being a horrible bank robber. It turns out everyone in the world enjoys being an awful person, because Payday 2 has remained near the very top of the Steam’s sales charts since its release, while hovering in and around the top ten most played games list. I chatted to him about what it’s like being a tiny studio with a huge hit. Read the rest of this entry »

After a weekend on the beta, where the game crashed and lost my progress and the following missions were so tough that I couldn’t claw it back, I’ll admit I didn’t like Payday 2. I quit, leaving my friend Owen to carry on with random players. But Owen has a way about him. A childish enthusiasm that he constantly fired at me on IM. He was having fun, and he wanted Bopo & Bucko* to team up again. He’d show me the way, he said. Then Jim said we should WiT it. So I threw the mask on, we formed a crime team with a pair of other friends, and hopped back online. Here’s wot I think.Read the rest of this entry »

Payday 2, Overkill’s co-operative heist ‘em up, eventually had to come out with its hands up, and they’ve decided today is that day. They’ve chosen to let us know with a launch trailer, and actually released it on launch day. That’s a rarity for the games industry. It is one of those frozen moment type deals, where the action of a heist has been stopped in the most cinematically pleasing way and the camera zooms around to take it all in: bullets are caught in the air like bubbles in ice, blood spurts from wounds like the red branches from a meat tree, police dropping like Del Boy* at a bar when someone has paused a DVD of “TV’s 100 Greatest Del Boys Falling Through The Bar”. It is embedded below.Read the rest of this entry »

What promise of gaming’s future has failed to materialise for you? What was the most exciting feature that’s only been half thought out, or tried once and then abandoned? For me, it’s multiplayer shooters levels with dynamic elements. Left 4 Dead 2 was supposed to feel like you were crawling over different routes depending on the difficulty selection, but what it amounted to was the player being squeezed a few steps in one direction or another. Will Payday 2 be the first game to successfully pull it off? I have the beta, but I’ve not had enough time with it to find out. However, the new trailer claims your decisions will affect one playthrough to the next, perhaps even selecting a different map for to play on. If that happens, I’ll be one fun lovin’ criminal.Read the rest of this entry »